If you supply a processor, the list of information its customers want alongside the product is growing, and it now runs from sourcing credentials and environmental impact to emissions data and labelling. Elise Mizzi set that out for the producers who attended the Andrews Meat Industries (AMI) Producer Day in Lidcombe last week, in a presentation on what AMI’s customers are asking for, and what stood out was how openly it was put. Those requests do not stop at the processor, and they reach your farm as well, which makes it useful to hear them set out plainly.
The day also took in a tour of the facilities and presentations from the AMI team, along with a panel on the AMI Wagyu program, and the panel picked up the thread. Ruminati co-founder and COO Will Onus joined Charlie Perry, Jo-Ann Strong and Will McCrohon, and the point the panel took up was that most of what supply chains need already exists. It lives on farms like yours, in your management records and in the day-to-day decisions you are already making, and it is also what an emissions report is built from, with your livestock numbers, inputs and production turned into a figure that shows how the farm is running. Sourcing credentials and labelling work the same way, because the evidence a buyer wants about where your stock came from and how it was raised starts as the records you keep on the property.
The challenge is getting that information to move in a way that works for everyone in the chain (you included), without adding another layer of admin to an already stretched workload. Ruminati thinks about that constantly, and the value of the panel was in working through it from your side of the fence and from the processor and supply chain side at the same time. Those conversations are harder to have when everyone is communicating through a form.
The practical step is to know your own figures before a request reaches you. A first emissions report completed early is yours to bring to that conversation on your own terms, and who sees it stays your decision. A processor that sets out openly what its customers are asking makes that conversation easier to have, and with your own record in hand you are ready to take part in it.
